05 September 2008

Echo chamber: Social media strategists are talking to themselves

Echo chamber: Social media strategists are talking to themselves | Feeds | ZDNet.com: "Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about social media as an industry. Or as a field. It’s very new. We’re still finding ourselves. We’re trying to figure out exactly what it is. What the parameters are. Who should lead it within an organization. For that matter, we’re still struggling for a specific definition as to what social media actually is.

As far as social media strategists, we’re a tight lot. We’ll friend one another on Facebook, follow one another on Twitter, read one another’s blogs. We’ve formed a reasonably tight community in which we’ll evangelize to one another concepts such as authenticity and transparency, relevance and subtlety. We’ll say that companies today must listen. They must engage their communities. We’ll all agree with ourselves.
But at this point, that’s clearly not enough. And the first thing we must do is recognize this.

About a month ago Forrester came out with a study of 16 social networking efforts put together by brands and their agencies. They found that of the 16, a full 15 were failing to make the grade. According to their metrics, this is a 94 percent failure rate. And the primary reasons for these failures were that those that were implementing the campaigns were using traditional online methodologies, leading Jeremiah Owyang to state ‘many brands are wasting their time, money, and resources.’ That’s not harsh…it’s accurate and fair.

The negative consequences of what we would call poorly run campaigns may not be all that readily apparent either. They could be looked on as learning experiences, experiences that can be improved on the next time around. A tweak here, a tweak there. All done by the same players that were in the first go around.
Now many of us will say, in a somewhat frustrated and self-satisfied tone, that ‘they just don’t get it.’ These senior advertising agency and PR firm execs or corporate CMOs and marketing directors don’t know what they’re doing when it comes to social media."